חֲמוֹת

Again they wept aloud, and Orpah kissed her mother-in-law goodbye, but Ruth clung to her.

Boaz replied, “I have been made fully aware of all you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband, how you left your father and mother and the land of your birth, and how you came to a people you did not know before.

She picked up the grain and went into the town, where her mother-in-law saw what she had gleaned. And she brought out what she had saved from her meal and gave it to Naomi.

Then her mother-in-law asked her, “Where did you glean today, and where did you work? Blessed be the man who noticed you.” So she told her mother-in-law where she had worked. “The name of the man I worked with today is Boaz,” she said.

So Ruth stayed close to the servant girls of Boaz to glean grain until the barley and wheat harvests were finished. And she lived with her mother-in-law.

One day Ruth’s mother-in-law Naomi said to her, “My daughter, should I not seek a resting place for you, that it may be well with you?

So she went down to the threshing floor and did everything her mother-in-law had instructed her to do.

When Ruth returned to her mother-in-law, Naomi asked her, “How did it go, my daughter?” Then Ruth told her all that Boaz had done for her.

And she said, “He gave me these six measures of barley, for he said, ‘Do not go back to your mother-in-law empty-handed.’”

For a son dishonors his father, a daughter rises against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. A man’s enemies are the members of his own household.